Long before Mercury, Venus, Earth, and Mars formed, it seems that the inner solar system may have harbored a number of super-Earths—planets larger than Earth but smaller than Neptune. If so, those planets are long gone—broken up and fallen into the sun billions of years ago largely due to a great inward-and-then-outward journey that Jupiter made early in the solar system's history.

This possible scenario has been suggested by Konstantin Batygin, a Caltech planetary scientist, and Gregory Laughlin of UC Santa Cruz in a paper that appears the week of March 23 in the online edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS). The results of their calculations and simulations suggest the possibility of a new picture of the early solar system that would help to answer a number of outstanding questions about the current makeup of the solar system and of Earth itself.For example, the new work addresses why the terrestrial planets in our solar system have such relatively low masses compared to the planets orbiting other sun-like stars.

"Our work suggests that Jupiter's inward-outward migration could have destroyed a first generation of planets and set the stage for the formation of the mass-depleted terrestrial planets that our solar system has today," says Batygin, an assistant professor of planetary science. "All of this fits beautifully with other recent developments in understanding how the solar system evolved, while filling in some gaps."
​Thanks to recent surveys of exoplanets—planets in solar systems other than our own—we know that about half of sun-like stars in our galactic neighborhood have orbiting planets. Yet those systems look nothing like our own. In our solar system, very little lies within Mercury's orbit; there is only a little debris—probably near-Earth asteroids that moved further inward—but certainly no planets. That is in sharp contrast with what astronomers see in most planetary systems. These systems typically have one or more planets that are substantially more massive than Earth orbiting closer to their suns than Mercury does, but very few objects at distances beyond...."